


Schrodinger's Criminal.

by theworstwolves



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Masturbation, Post-His Last Vow, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 16:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1434358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theworstwolves/pseuds/theworstwolves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If a man shoots himself in the head and there's no body found, is he dead or alive?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dead.

**Author's Note:**

> I know 'alive or dead' sounds better but I don't like ending on angst.  
> You can read the chapters independently of each other, they're two different stories.   
> If I need to add any more warnings let me know.  
> Unbeta'd so any and all mistakes are my own.

“Miss me?” the voice asks.

He smiles at the screen, filling the glass by him back up and downing it in celebration.

It’s an accumulation of years of work, days and nights of sitting up at computer screen; splicing together audio so it’s sounds just right, finding video footage that will fit. It needs to be good. No, it needs to be great, it needs to be unquestionable. And it is, he’s made sure of that. It’s fucking flawless, so convincing that sometimes he allows himself to believe it in that way that they will.

“Miss me”. It seems as good a place to start as any, it took him a while to decide on that one, but it’s from the last video Jim made so it seems fitting. He’s got enough audio to drag this out for years, he’s going to tear the whole of London apart hiding behind Jim’s voice. They’re going to think he’s back and they won’t know how to stop him, if he doesn’t get caught that is. He can make Jim say whatever he wants , has him to thank for that he guesses, all those stupid videos he made, the way he taped each and every phone conversation because ‘you never know what could come up Sebastian dear’ . He has enough audio to bring Jim Moriarty back to life,  if only through his voice, but then again that was all people really paid attention to, that voice, that reputation, it’s not like they’ll know the difference.

He knows the difference. He knows the difference and every time the voice speaks it feels like he’s being gutted.

*                                                                   

There were nights when he felt like he couldn’t do it anymore, like it was all going too far. He questioned if Jim would want him to do this. Jim had a plan and this wasn’t part of his, Jim was playing and game and maybe now is when they should admit they lost. But Jim shot himself in his fucking head so Sebastian decides that Jim has no say in this, not now he’s nothing more than sound waves and graphics on a computer screen.

He’d lay himself out on the sofa after spending all day in the dark looking at the screen - It’s not like he had anything better to do, your boss killing himself tends to terminate a work contract pretty quickly – but at night he’d let himself rest, see how much progress he’d made, and sometimes…

“Sebastian.”  The voice says, and he ignores the twist in his stomach that tells him he shouldn’t be doing this. That using the voice clips to claw back the empire is one thing but this; this seems to cross a line.

 He pushes that thought away.

“Sebastian” the voice says, and the hitch of breath afterwards sounds almost real.

“Darling…” It’s easy now, pretending that the hands on him are Jim’s, that the moans on the tape are Jims and not ripped of some fucking porno he found one night, he’s had enough practice. Those little breathy noises could be coming from  Jim, if he only closed his eyes. Which he does. He closes his eyes and thinks about Jim and soon both of them are panting and moaning and when he comes it’s Jim’s name on his lips and the laugh on the tape sounds so familiar that he wishes maybe he hadn’t included it.

*

He got him to recite fucking poetry once. It was a work exercise he told himself. At the start the files sounded so obviously spliced together that anyone would be able to tell that it wasn’t the real thing. If he was going to do this he was going to do it right, so he got himself a bottle of vodka and set about sorting the problem.

The result was pretty spectacular, the sort of thing it would take an expert to confirm as a fake. But waking up hung over to Jim reading him Sonnet 18 resulted in the computer being smashed and him having to pick slithers of screen glass from his knuckles, and only backups on computer disks meaning the project wasn’t ruined.

He almost broke them too, he’s glad he didn’t.

Because London is going to suffer. Like he has. He’s going to burn the world down around him. Jim once told him that there was nothing more dangerous than a man who had nothing left to live for, he might as well prove him right.

*

“Miss me?”  the voice asks, and Sebastian takes another shot.


	2. Alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Give Lying To You by Keaton Henson a listen)

If you’d told him three years ago that he’d be spending a Saturday night sat on the sofa watching TV with his fucking girlfriend Sebastian would have laughed in your face. Because it seemed then that there was no way in hell his life could ever be that mundane, a whole load of shit would have had to have happened for that to be a viable situation.

Turns out in life sometimes a load of shit does happen and watching the news at ten with a woman who teaches nursery school is, if anything, a way to make the best out of a bad situation.

Jenny’s nice, he’ll give her that, she’s pretty, she’s good in bed and she doesn’t push him about parts of his life he doesn’t want to tell her. She traces his scars but asks no questions. She’s no Jim Moriarty but given the way that turned out that’s probably a good thing.  It’s normal, it’s nice, it’s what most people want out of life right? They’re sharing a bottle of wine, or more he’s emptying the bottle into her glass while still on his first. It’s not that he wants to get her drunk (she isn’t a fun drunk, she just tends to fall asleep) but that _he_ doesn’t want to. After over a year of drinking every night, of waking up in strangers beds  and still feeling like shit Sebastian decided that there were ways he could deal with this like an adult, and none of them were casual alcoholism.

He mention it to her once, early on, it wasn’t a first date conversation, but it wasn’t far off. “I lost someone.” She said to him and he’d nodded, told her “Yeah, me too.” It’s the only time he ever admitted it .

He swears when the TV glitches, it’s new, everything in this damn apartment is and sure, it’s only a material possession but he hadn’t quite expected things to start falling apart so quickly.

“Miss me?”

He freezes, blinks, grabs the remote to change the channel, because whatever it was he saw it can’t have been real. But it is, and it’s on every channel he changes to. “Miss me?" "Miss me? "Miss me?” Next to him Jenny shivers. “He always gave me the creeps.” She says, “What do you think it is? Some kind of advert.  Do you think they’re making a documentary about him, a film maybe? Isn’t that too soon, I mean after all that things he did…”

“Get out.”

He hadn’t really meant to say it, but she can’t be here anymore, whatever the hell this on the TV she can’t be here to see it, she won’t understand, she thinks it’s some kind of marketing, it disgusts her. Suddenly she disgusts him. Her smile and her curves, the way she looks at him, the fact that when he wakes with a shout from sleep she’s rubs his back and tells him he’s okay. She’s sickening, her and all of this fucking suburban dystopia he’s found himself living in.

“Get the fuck out.” She looks shocked, she looks like she’s about to cry but he doesn’t care, he stands and opens the door for her and doesn’t listen to her protests as she leaves. He turns the TV off because he can’t watch it anymore, he can’t see that face and hear that voice and know that it’s not real. He’s going to find whoever did this and he’s going to fucking rip them apart.

Twenty minutes go by, of him just sitting there, staring at the blank screen and wondering why the hell this is happening now, wondering who would be stupid enough to put Jim’s face on screens all over England, who thought they’d be no consequences. When the phone rings he hangs up without looking at it, it’ll be Jenny, recovering from her shock and realising that he’s not allowed to talk to her like that. She’ll shout and she’ll cry and maybe they’ll make up, maybe they won’t, it doesn’t really matter, she’s just as fake as everything else. The phone rings again, and again, and again until he picks it up, finally ready to deal with the consequences of what could probably be considered a meltdown.  

It’s not Jenny.

“Miss me…Sebastian?”

He throws the phone so hard across the room that it shatters, piece of shit. Not that it matters, he doesn’t need it any more. He doesn’t need any of this, the middle class lifestyle that he was only renting, the girlfriend with the cat and the temp job at a security firm, it’s all bullshit.

The knock on the door comes five minutes later and the shit eating grin on Jim’s face reason enough for Sebastian to make Jim wish that he had actually fucking shot himself in the head. For now at least.

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow these's too have clawed their way back up my OTP list.  
> Had this idea after watching his last vow so that says something about how productive I am.  
> This is the first proper thing I written for this pairing, hope you enjoy it.


End file.
